Steppe is the latest deep ambient track from our duo Doc & Lena Selyanina. It is a peaceful, meditative and atmospheric song inspired by the vast expanses of steppes. Lena, who composed the song, has personal experience of the steppe nature as she lived and worked a year on the Russian side of Kazakh Steppe as a beginning music teacher.
A 24bit / 88.2 kHz FLAC encoded audiophile version of the song (400 MB download) is also available as a torrent.
Lena Selyanina and I have just released our seventh album titled Vienna Blue. All our albums so far have fitted into the broad genre definition of ambient, but this one is something else. To put some sort of label on it, it is piano based neoclassical-avantgarde with influences from jazz, blues and electronic music.
The album started to unfold from the track Der Leiermann which we recorded in May 2008. The song was inspired by the similarly titled song from Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle – a work that had made a deep impression on both Lena and me. While working on our ambient albums we had occasionally speculated about doing something Schubert related but we rejected the idea every time because Schubert’s music just did not have that air of ambience in it. Then one evening Lena just sat down at the piano and started to improvise around Schubert’s Der Leiermann theme… and what came out sounded so good that I immediately started recording.
As it often goes, the song soon started to live its own life and was fairly quickly and easily finished. We liked the strange and mystical atmosphere of the song so much that we again considered working on a Schubert themed album. Realizing it would not be ambient but something else, Lena started to compose and improvise totally fresh material from all sorts of musical and thematic associations she had from Schubert – her favorite classical composer since her conservatory years. Songs that came out were quite different in style but we did not worry about it – at the end we just left out a couple of songs that were too different from the overall album style.
This album is above all a demonstration of Lena’s creative talent as a composer and as a pianist. It is like an adventure taking the listener into various inner and outer places and situations, from the soberness of a cold winter landscape where a wanderer leaves the safety of his home (Wanderer) to a scary encounter with one’s doppelgänger (Doppelgänger) to the emotional blue in rainy Vienna (Vienna Blue) to the diagnostic beauty of a lunatic asylum’s garden where a well-medicated Shostakovich Memory Orchestra is playing beautiful neoclassical music for Doktor Freud on a lovely sunny summer afternoon (Impromptu). The listener is also treated with the erotic joy of a sensual waltz (Naughty Waltz), the beautiful passion of a classical romance (An die Romanze) until at the end there is an encounter with the solitary reaper himself in the form of an old hurdy gurdy man (Der Leiermann).
Enjoy the adventure!
Doc
ps. A 24bit FLAC audiophile version of the album is available as a torrent from here, and if you need full cover and CD artwork for a hard copy, you find them from here.
